I am printing with a 0.2mm nozzle. Earlier I found that there were locational waves in my first layer, so I asked what to do on Discord, and people suggested I manually tram the bed. I followed the procedure on the Bambu wiki.
However, I found it super hard to tell when the bed would meet the nozzle when the nozzle is in the rear position, because I can’t see it well. So I also found a discussion in the forum about using a feeler gauge to fine-tune this. Using the menu, I manually moved the head to the same three positions and ensured that a feeler gauge had the same friction in all three places.
Unfortunately, now it’s way way worse. Can anyone tell me how I can fix this?
Ditto, clean the plate. Those light colored spots are areas with air under them, not adhering to the plate.
When tramming, I use a flashlight to illuminate the area behind the nozzle. Put your eye at the level of the plate and the light shining through the nozzle-bed gap makes it very clear when the nozzle “just touches” the plate. Use a wrench for easier and more precise adjustments.
My X1C was produced in early 2023, when Bambu was shipping printers with very warped beds. Tramming cannot fix warp, but Bambu support still wanted the bed re-trammed before they would acknowledge the problem and ship a new bed. After installing the new bed, it also needed to be trammed. The X1Plus firmware that I installed last June produces more precise leveling data, so I had to play with that. (It’s even more level now, but you can’t tell from my prints.)
I’m more familiar with the procedure than I would like.
But the bed has never shifted on its own, so if your bed is satisfactorily level, leave it be.
Exactly, I feel that “tramming your bed” is a carryover habit from other printer manufacturers. Back before ABL and magnetic build plates. You had to use force to remove parts from the build surface and that would often throw out the bed level.
The first layer picture shows adhesion issues so either the bed still isn’t clean or either the microfiber or the alcohol you used is decontaminating it.
Yes, AND it should also handle the cases of very minor imperfections in tramming and imperfections in the build plate. Anyhow, I’m cleaning it again for the Nth time, and we’ll see.
Here’s what I think happened. There’s some kind of lubricant on the feeler gauge. Although I had cleaned it off the print bed, I had not cleaned the print head. So I cleaned that thoroughly, and now I’m no longer having adhesion problems.
However, I’m back to the problem I had before: Locational ripples.
Normally, I’d say this sort of thing was a pressure advance / flow dynamics problem. But the problem only occurs in certain locations.
That’s still an adhesion issue. That first layer should be perfectly smooth. Those light-colored striations are where the filament isn’t adhering well. There is definitely either contamination or damage on those areas of the plate. That can even be where a previous print stuck really well, and left a film of that filament that isn’t coming off with washing. For that you can try to lightly scotch-brite the plate in those areas to remove that filament film.
Also, I had a roll of that filament, and it is a b*tch to get to stick worth a ■■■■ to pretty much anything. The plate needs to be pretty much new/pristine. Do you have a totally unused side of a build plate to test on? If not, you can resort to Elmer’s purple glue if needed, it works very well. However, I also found that the newer, gold, textured PEI plate and definitely the smooth PEI plate have MUCH better adhesion for pretty much all filaments. I actually have a tough time getting many prints off of my smooth PEI plate. The gold textured plate is less sticky, but still MUCH better than the original black textured plate that came with my printer. I don’t even use it anymore, unless I’m doing something like PC and know that I’m going to need glue, as I don’t use glue at all on the other two plates above.
